As you probably know, there are premium (paid) and free themes for WordPress. Choosing among them is quite an issue for many beginners who don’t know if it pays to pay the price. We will now make a list of pros and cons of both premium and free themes and then you can decide by yourself.

First pro is obvious. It is free. Cost is a very important factor to consider when you purchase anything, and it can’t get cheaper than free.

Reviewing process. Even though they are free, they have to abide to high quality standards to be posted on the official website. This is why we recommend to stay away from free themes that aren’t in the official site, they haven’t been reviewed.

CONS

Almost no support. Since they are free, the support options are very limited. They usually offer forum support but they have no obligation to reply to your queries.

Limited functionality. Free themes usually have less functionality than paid ones. The most standard features are widely-spread but others like shortcodes, landing pages and creating buttons are not as much.

Not exclusive. Since they are free they are used by a whole lot of people, which means your website won’t have a unique design and will be quite “standard”.

No warranty. If something happens you have nobody to ask.

PREMIUM THEMES

There are many marketplaces and theme shops where you can buy premium themes. These are always third-party ones.

PROS

Features and customization. With paid themes, you will get many more features and customization options, since this is a very competitive market you will find some of them with almost everything you need.

As they are getting money, they offer support and updates which are not guaranteed on free themes.

When you add up that not so many people use them because they have to pay and a lot of customization options, you get a unique looking website instead of a standard one.

CONS

Botched coding. Yes, even though they are paid themes they don’t go through the official revision so, the code may be faulty. When you see a premium theme you usually look to the screenshots and they may look beautiful indeed, but not as functional as you expect later.

Overwhelming features. Having a lot of options is usually good, unless you have too many. Sometimes developers add so many functions that are making your website slow and you aren’t going to use them.